


Home

by akadiene



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mental Institutions, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 23:13:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16544156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akadiene/pseuds/akadiene
Summary: It was hot the day he first went to the Home.





	Home

It was hot the day he first went to the Home. That’s what they called it, Caleb and the other residents, the patients, or the ones Caleb spoke to at least, once he was able to speak: the Home. Maybe it had a different name -- well, it must have had one, something grand and meant to be comforting, but that’s what they always called it. He didn’t know what the nurses and clerics and doctors said. He never asked, not in all his eleven years there.

It didn’t feel much like a home, in any case, and Caleb knew deeply then what home felt like. Knows, possibly, still, but that’s another conversation entirely. He knew then, back on that hot day he was taken to the Home, that based on the name alone it should have felt like building snow-dwarves in Duscar with the other children on his lane, the cold so sharp his breath was visible and his cheeks had to be slathered in cheap home-made ointment with gentle hands to protect them from frostbite, then coming in to warm himself at the hearth, his extremities tingling as heat returned to them, and holding a cup of hot tea close to his chest or, as he grew older, spiced mead as a special treat. Over supper -- vegetables they’d pickled in the summer and whatever scraps could be scrounged from the local butcher at the end of each day -- lively debates over politics and taxes and stories led by Caleb’s father to encourage him to speak up and think and convince and then before bed some magic-practice, simple dancing lights and messages until he could do them without thinking, the movements sewn into his muscles. His mattress was thin and lumpy and stuffed in the corner of the room he had to share with his parents but his parents made sure there were no holes in the roof and he always had books to read and candlelight with with to read by and that, that was home.

That was home, and Home was not it. Caleb doesn’t remember much from his first day -- mostly, he recalls only the heat. Syrupy and thick with sweat pooling down the small of his back and in the crease of his knees. He smelled smoke, and he couldn’t understand why fires were lit inside at the end of spring, this unusually blistering late Thunsheer day, but then he thought maybe they were burning nearby fields to improve the soil. He didn’t know if the place was near farmland but that had to be the explanation. Some things needed to burn before they grew.

The rest of that day is gone, and the day after that too, and really the next year is mostly a blur, save for a few clear moments: the first shock of cold water as he was bathed with rough and quick but not uncaring hands by a nurse the first time his body refused to even undress itself on its own; waking up in the middle of one night with a desperate need for the bathroom but finding the door to his room locked and knocking on it for so long until he pissed himself; mornings in the garden pulling weeds from the row of carrots for which he’d been given responsibility; meeting Keylan three years in, the man with whom he shared a room for next five, and who communicated mostly in single words and hand gestures and sang himself to sleep every night. Keylan left eventually because his family could no longer pay the Home to keep him, or so the rumours went. There were always rumours going around in the Home, of course. Gossip was sustenance, some kind of connection to each other, some kind of community. 

Caleb wonders who paid for him.

He wonders who brought him to the Home, and how he got there. He wonders about his favourite cleric from the Home and where she is now. He wonders about the family of the guard he killed to escape, and what her name was. He wonders about his row of carrots, which he tended to for a decade, and he wonders about Keylan. If he could find him. If he’s still alive. If he’s learned any new songs, if he could sing them for Caleb one more time. He wonders who lives in the Home now, and how they feel about it -- he’s never been able to decide that himself. And he wonders, always, about the heat, and the smoke, and whether or not someone had really lit fires or burned those fields on a hot day in late Thunsheer, the day he first went to the Home.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at [fjordhavemercy](http://www.fjordhavemercy.tumblr.com)


End file.
